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Wednesday, November 13, 2013

Hacker Ehud Tenenbaum arrested again for money-laundering

Fifteen years after his 1998 arrest for hacking the U.S.
government, the police are charging Tenenbaum with a sophisticated
money-laundering scheme to bring money held overseas to Israel. Whose money is
another matter: Police suspect that organized-crime gangs were using Tenenbaum
to launder their ill-gotten gains.

On Tuesday the suspects Tenenbaum and his brother Segev,
with Barak Levy, Luciano Alter and Avraham Fruchter were brought before the
Rishon Lezion Magistrate’s Court, where their remands were extended to Sunday.

The remand of an additional suspect, Gavriel Ben Lavie, was extended to
Thursday.

The evidence, including a classified report, substantiate
the allegations, the judge wrote in his decision yesterday.

An undercover investigation into Tenenbaum began months ago,
following information obtained in a different investigation entirely, of
money-changers in the center of the country. When suspicions arose that
organized-crime rings were using these money-changers as conduits to transfer
funds, the probe was handed over to the International Crime unit.

Police seized 79,000 euros and $11,000 cash from the
suspects’ homes. Hoping to find the source of the cash, police are looking into
the possibility that it came from a case of credit-card fraud in Canada in
which Tenenbaum was charged in 2008.

Tenenbaum first earned notoriety as “The Analyzer” in 1998
when he hacked computers at the Pentagon, the FBI, and NASA, and served an
eight-month sentence for his actions.